On tacit knowledge management in product design: status, challenges, and trends

Mass personalisation production is one of the strategic priorities for the next transformation of the production paradigm and market economy. With the purpose of offering personalised products to satisfy customers on an individual basis, tacit knowledge rooted in individuals has become increasingly accepted as an integral part of product design. This paper aims to explore the state-of-the-art in tacit knowledge management with a product design focus. Particularly, methods for tacit knowledge acquisition, transfer, and reuse are reviewed and analysed. Research on tacit knowledge acquisition is mainly dedicated to making tacit knowledge explicit. In knowledge transfer, both formal and informal approaches have been adopted to enable knowledge circulation. Research on tacit knowledge reuse is much less and scattered, and the main work focuses on user modelling and the reuse of empirical knowledge. Five challenges of tacit knowledge management are identified in this paper: lack of unified tacit knowledge definition, massive heterogeneous data, authenticity and completeness verification, uncertainty and gaps in bridging tacit knowledge management and personalised design, lack of practical knowledge sharing and inheritance tools. To fill these research gaps, five thematic future directions are suggested with possible visions to facilitate knowledge circulation, customer co-creation and innovation in mass personalised design.